2.7. Some Games.

Games are the least common usage of Linux and free software, not because of it's advanced design but because Games makers marketing policies, many of them still produce games on ROMs even though CDs are larger,lighter,cheaper,...etc just because it's more difficult to copy a ROM. Linux games do exists but you have to dig for them.

Section quotes:

• "(...) but giving people the power to do even silly things is what Linux is all about."
      -- Linus Torvalds on LKML.
• "I want you guys to look at your computer screen, imagining the worst monster you can (the cacodeamon from Quake will do, just make him hairier and bigger and more MEAN), and think of me."
      -- Linus Torvalds on LKML.
• "nVidia driver loaded - bugs to nVidia. vmware loaded bugs to vmware, both loaded, God help you, nobody else will."
      -- Alan Cox on LKML
• "Play Rogue, visit exotic locations, meet strange creatures and kill them."
      -- found on 'fortune-mod'
• "The games have always strengthened us. Death becomes a familiar pattern. We don't fear it as you do."
      -- Proconsul Marcus Claudius, Startrek.

Section contents:

• 2.7.1. GNOME games.
• 2.7.2. KDE games.
• 2.7.3. Extra games.
• 2.7.4. Playstation games and other emulators.
• 2.7.5. Notes.

2.7.1. GNOME games.

some GNOME games Screenshots:

gataxx

gnect

gnomine

iagno

gnotravex

same-gnome

gnotski

sol

mahhjongg

---

some KDE games screenshots

KAsteroids

kpat

• gataxx: This thinking game, this winner who has more discs, click on one of your discs then on one of the 8 surrounding squares (should be empty) you will have a new disc there, or move it to on one step after the surrounding squares (move mean you won't get a new disc), in both cases all enmy discs that surround the new/moved disc will become your.
• gnect: A challenge bewteen you and the other player (maybe computer) to put 4 balls in one stright line. you touch a ball from the top it will fall to the ground or on the top of other balls.
• gnome-stones: collect gems and avoid stones,like Supaplex but I like 'rocksndiamonds' more.
• gnibbles: A snake game, feed it and don't run into walls.
• gnomine: Minesweeper game, you should find mine locations by analyzing numbers, left click on any place you think it's safe it will tell you the number of mines in the surrounding 8 squares, right click where you think there is a mine. you win when you find all mines.
• iagno: One of my favorite games, in this Othello game put your enmpy discs between two of your discs and they flip to be yours.
• gnotravex: A puzzel where you should match tile edges, to solve it first look for a unique numbers and put it in a corner where it has not to match anything.
• same-gnome: Click on balls if there are more than one adjacent balls with same color they will disappear, you should thing how you remove as muny balls in as few moves as possible.
• gnotski: In this Klotski game, you should get the special piece (shown in as holes out) out of the box, when it though the door it disappear, then you may take it to the holes.
• sol (or aisleriot): A nice card game (see 'kpat').
• freecell: A nother card game (see 'kpat').
• mahjongg: An eastern tile game, select two free matched tile to remove them, free mean no tile blocks them on the left or right side.
• glines: put 5 balls in one line.
• gtali: A dice game.

2.7.2. KDE games.

I don't use KDE that much, and so I don't play KDE games that much, you may send me emails about them, see http://games.kde.org/.

• KDE Arcade games:
  • KAsteroids: A 'star-dust' like game, avoid and shoot all asteroids
  • KSmileTris: A Tetris game, with happy faces instead of blocks.
  • KSirtet: Another Tetris game.
  • KFoulEggs: A Japanese PuyoPuyo game, another tetris like game.
  • KBounce: Jazzball clone, you shade area and bounce ball(s) in it by building walls you move the pointer and click you may change the direction by 90 degrees, if any ball touch wall while being constructed you lose.
  • KTron: Tron clone, you and your enmy move and leave a tail behind, you should avoid running into walls, your tail or your enmy tail.
  • KSpaceDuel: Another space arcade game.
  • KGoldRunner: Loderunner clone,guide our hero to collect gold,and climb up to next level, you may dig holes to escape from your enmy.
  • KSnakeRace: Another snake game,like gnibbles but with better graphics,
  • Kolf: Mini golf game.
• KDE Card games:
  • KPoker: Poker card game.
  • KPat (or Patience): some card games with best graphics (see 'pysol').
  • lskat (or Lieutnant Skat): Another card game.
• KDE Boardgames:
  • KMahjongg: Mahjongg is an eastern tile game.
  • KBackgammon: Backgammon dice game. (dice games, including backgammon, are forbidden in Islam, they lead one to be addicted to gambling)
  • Atlantik: Monopoly-like network board games.
  • KBlackBox: In this puzzle you should deduce the position of the hidden ball, by shooting rays and analyzing where it emerge.
  • KBattleship: In this Battleship game, you should sink your enmy ships.
  • KShisen: This Shisen-Sho game is similar to Mahjongg.
  • Kenolaba: Abalone like game, each player has 14 piece and you should move in a way that you move 6 pieces of you opponent out of the board.
  • KWin4: Like gnect, put 4 balls in one line to win.
  • KReversi: You captures a piece it turn to your color, the winner is who has more pieces of his color.
• KDE Strategy (mind challenging) games:
  • KAtomic: You have to from the wanted molecule from atoms, when you move an atom in the specified direction it won't stop until it's stopped by a wall or another atom.
  • Kolor:
  • KSokoban: Japanese Sokoban game, you are a warehouse keeper you should push crates to their proper place, you may not jump or pull them.
  • KMines: Another minesweeper.
  • KJumpingCube: Click on squares to increase points until it flood to the it's neighbours and become yours.
  • KSame (or SameGame): Like same-gnome.
  • Klickety: Clickomania clone, it's like 'same' game.
  • Konquest: GNU Lactic Konquest game, in this strategy you should expand your interstellar empire though the galaxy.
  • KLines: Move marbles from cell to cell to create 5 marbles line it disappear, each step the computer drops three marbles.
• KDE toys:
  • ktuberling: a silly Mr. Potato editor, which is a Potato Guy game for little small children they can use it to draw a potato face, or a penguin.

2.7.3. Extra games.

Lucky Debian users usually have most of those games, many of them comes with Mandrake Linux CDs, and if you are using Red Hat check freshrpm.net or other RPM sites.

Sokoban in RocksNDiamonds

Rocks and Diamonds (rocksndiamonds): This is a thinking and action puzzle game, with more than a thousand of levels, it contian levels from many classical games like Supaplex, in which you have to collect information then goto 'E' exit, and avoid rocks. Sokoban is another classical game you could play, should put each light bulb on power source.

Supaplex in RocksNDiamonds

Linux Breakout II (lbreakout2): Linux Breakout II, break all blocks but don't drop the ball, catch gifts and be careful from tricks some may turn light off, another may freez you too drop the ball. There are many level collections.

Linux Breakout II

Frozen Bubbles (frozen-bubble): Clone for Puzzle Bubble / Bust-A-Move, you should drop all balls to move to next level, you shoot a ball and if it's surrounded by at least 2 balls of the same color they all will fall, see www.frozen-bubble.org. Another (in)famous similar games are 'xbubble' and 'gemdropx'.

Frozen Bubbles

• icebreaker: Like KBounce, with different story: "So, uh, there's a bunch of penguins on an iceberg in Antarctica. You have been selected to catch them so they can be shipped to Finland, where they are essential to a secret plot for world domination", you play fast with the mouse, you should shade larger zone, right click will change the direction 90 degrees.
• clanbomber: Bomb walls to win.

X-Tux (xtux): a multidirectional scrolling arcade game in which you control famous Free Software characters such as Tux, Beastie or RMS in an attempt to save the World from an evil software company. Solarwolf: An action/arcade game, Collect the boxes and don't become mad, see 'www.pygame.org/shredwheat/solarwolf/' xevil: XEvil is a 3rd person, side-view, fast-action, violent, side-scrolling kill-them-before-they-kill-you arcade game. Fight against either computer-controlled enemies, or another player.

X-Tux

• Abuse (abuse-sdl): a side scrolling shoot-em-up action game from Crack.Com.
• burgerspace: Avoid evil foodstuffs and make burgers.
• "SnakeIt", "Nibbles" and "Tron" clones: Those games are based on the same principle with different stories, in the first two you feed grow up but you have to avoid eating your own tail, or running onto wall, the last one's story is based on a Disney movie from 1982 called "Tron" where you ride on a light-cycle (a kind of motorbike) which leaves a wall (tail) behind, it keeps moving forward unless you turn 90 degrees at a time. we have many of those clones beside gnibbles (GNOME), 'ksnake' and 'ktron' (KDE):
  • armagetron: A 3D Tron-like high speed game, one of the best clones with fine 3D graphics (OpenGL) and sound effects you could play against computer or humans though a network, you drive and build a wall behind (tail) and so do the computer and the first to run into a wall loses, see 'http://armagetron.sourceforge.net/'.
  • gltron: A 3D (OpenGL) tron-like game (see www.gltron.org)
  • heroes: 2D game (SDL or GGI) similar to "Tron","Snake" and "Nibbles" games, but includes many graphical improvements and new game features. Several styles of play are available, including "get-all-the-bonuses", deathmatch, and "squish-the-pedestrians", one or two players could play it.
  • xtron: Tron game for X.
  • snake4: basic but nice snake game.
  • sins: Snake game playable with only one single key (SDL).
• Tetris clones: Besides KSmileTris and KSirtet (KDE) we have:
  • tint: TINT Is Not Tetris(tm) it's probably the closest to the original tetris game written by Alexey Pajitnov, Dmitry Pavlovsky, and Vadim Gerasimov
  • cuyo: another tetris.
  • xpuyopuyo: A puzzle game similar to tetris.
  • crack-attack: multiplayer OpenGL puzzle game like "Tetris Attack".
  • xbl: 3D tetris like game.
• gbatnav: GNOME networked BattleShip game
• pinball: Emilia Pinball Emulator
• gravitywars: Gravity Wars is based on Gravity Force, another exciting ugly-looking game like those on Amiga.
• pathological: an enriched clone of the maze game "Logical" by Rainbow Arts. Where you have to fill each wheel with four marbles of matching color.
• pipenightdreams: Connect pipes to get the water flowing from inlet to outlet, a clone of the old arcade-game "Pipe Dreams".
• tuxpuck: "Shufflepuck Cafe" Clone.

marbles: This game need alot of thinking,like KAtomic, you should form the marbles as the prototype but marbles move in a direction until it is stopped by something. gtans: The Chinese Tangram puzzle (with GTK+) where the player has to arrange a set of pieces to match a given shape. All the pieces must be used and should not be laid on top of one another. 'gtans' contains more than 380 figures to play with, see 'http://gtans.sf.net'.

Marbles Puzzle

xboard: An X11 ugly looking chess game, it's just a front end to other programs, you may play with a friend using a network, or you may play against the computer with different levels (with many AI engines) and you may let those AI engines play against each other, it has too many optons but from command line. type 'man gnuchess' and 'man xboard', you may control time and difficulty. If you want more exciting chess playing you could use different AI engines, like GNU chess and crafty, but 'phalanx' offers a slow chess thinker that plays risky, active chess and shows quite good tactical performance

xboard chess

glchess: A nice 3D chess front end, it's amazing how small it is, you need 'gnu-chess' or 'crafty' AI engines to be able to play against the computer (in other words download 'glchess' and 'crafty', both are no more than 300KB)

GlChess

• Go: an ancient game originated from China, like chess it's a turn-based board game but with a definite history of over 3000 years, The Chinese call the game Weiqi, other names for Go include Baduk (Korean), Igo (Japanese), and Goe (Taiwanese). It's like chess but with fewer rules to learn, Go can be a more intellectually challenging game than chess and chinese chess. Nonetheless, Go is not a difficult game to learn, so have a fun time playing the game with your friends. GNU Go ('www.gnu.org/software/gnugo/') is an engine for the game and 'cgoban' (http://cgoban1.sourceforge.net/) is an interface to it.
• backgammon: GNU backgammon (gnubg) is an AI engine for backgammon which could be improved when 'gnubg-bearoffs' is installed. (dice games, including backgammon, are forbidden in Islam, they lead one to be addicted to gambling)

pysol: more than 200 card games with nice help, written in python. gnomermind: Gnomermind Mastermind(R) for your GNOME desktop. codebreaker: A Master Mind clone using GTK. gtkboard: 18 game, fully completed: (Antichess, Ataxx, Fifteen puzzle, Hiq, Memory, Othello, Pentaline, Plot4, Rgb and Samegame) playable: (Checkers, Infiltrate, Hypermaze, Mastermind, Maze, and Tetris) unplayable: Chess, and Pacman Gnocatan: emulation of the Settlers of Catan board game.

PySol

• corewars: The classic corewars game with gtk-look. Corewars is a game which simulates a virtual machine with a number of programs. Each program tries to crash the others. The program that lasts the longest time wins. A number of sample programs are provided and new programs can be written by the player.
• realtimebattle: (GTK+) robots controlled by programs are fighting each other. The goal is to destroy the enemies, using the radar to examine the environment and the cannon to shoot.
• gnurobots: (GTK+) Program (in Scheme) a robot to explore a world, to get prizes and avoid being killed by a baddie or out of energy.
• xpuzzles:
  • Rotational 3D Puzzles: xrubik, xpyraminx, xoct, xskewb, xdino, xmball
  • Sliding Block Puzzles: xcubes, xtriangles, xhexagons, xpanex
  • Combination: xmlink

FreeCiv: a Civilization clone, it's is a strategy (deeply strategy) game (found on www.freeciv.org), in which you select a nation and bulid your civilization, it's multiple players game (as many as you want), also could be played on signle compter against AI (as many AIs as you want). First run 'civserver', if you like you could commands at 'civserver' prompt to change default options, then run the client 'civclient' on the background and enter the address and port and press connect (if no network the address should be '127.0.0.1', and leave port as is), at the server command prompt ('civserver'), type 'set aifill N', where N is the number of all players (AI and humans), the server will fill player that don't attend with AI players, for example if you type 'set aifill 4' and you play it alone this mean there are for players you and 3 AI, at any time to add an AI player use 'create NAME', where NAME could be any name (if it's a known leader, corresponding nation will be select), to start playing type 'start' at the server prompt, then all the clients will be activated, first build a city, use menus up there.

FreeCiv

• LinCity: You are required to build and maintain a city. You must feed, house, provide jobs and goods for your residents. You can build a sustainable economy with the help of renewable energy and recycling, or you can go for broke and build rockets to escape from a pollution ridden and resource starved planet, it's up to you.
• wesnoth: a turn-based strategy, it's a battle for control of villages, using variety of units which have advantages and disadvantages in different types of terrains and against different types of attacks. Units gain experience and advance levels, and are carried over from one scenario to the next campaign, see www.wesnoth.org.
• crimson: Crimson Fields is a hexagons-based tactical war game in the tradition of Battle Isle (tm). Tools are available to create custom maps and campaigns.
• xconq: A graphical Empire-type multi-player strategy game and game design system.
• teg: Turn based strategy game, Tenes Empanadas Graciela is a clone of 'Plan Tactico y Estrategico de la Guerra', based on Risk.
• xfrisk: Risk is a board game played on a map of the world, (with humans or AIs).

Real-time Strategy: freecraft: (see 'www.freecraft.net') is a clone of the realtime fantasy strategy game WarCraft II from Blizzard Entertainment, although it could be used to build other games like C&C or AoE, 'fcmp' is it's free media files from FreeCraft Media Project, maps could be created or edited with 'crafted'. netpanzer: an isometric view real-time tactical game [http://netpanzer.berlios.de] freedroid: A clone of Paradroid - a strategic shoot-em up boson: wargame real-time strategy game like Command&Conquer(tm) or StarCraft(tm). craft: You are a Viking and have to lead a nation (like warcraft-II) castle-combat: game where the player builds one castle and destroys others A clone of the old DOS game Rampart, see www.linux-games.com/castle-combat

Free Craft Netpanzer

American Army/AAO: A 3D game, developed by the American Army, the official site of the game is www.americasarmy.com.

AAO

Platform games: methane: Super Methane Brothers, move through a maze upward and kill insects with gas, it sounds like Super Mario Brothers. toppler: A platform game where you lead the frog to the top of the castle. amphetamine: jump'n run game with unique visual effects jumpnbump: platform game. a bunny, have to jump on your opponents to make them explode. xscavenger: A lode-runner-like platform game for X (see KGoldRunner in KDE games) pachi: Platform game featuring 'Pachi el marciano' who came from Mars and crashlanded in our planet because of an accident with his U.F.O. (SDL) pingus: Free Lemmings(TM) clone Your goal is to guide a horde of penguins through a world full of obstacles and penguin traps to safety.

Bethane Brothers

• beneath-a-steel-sky: a science fiction adventure game
• flight-of-the-amazon-queen: 2D point-and-click adventure game set in the 1940s, originally published for DOS and the Amiga.

vertical or horizontal scrolling: powermanga: one of the best 2D shooting space ship with 3D look, nice sound and graphic FX,it work fine of slow machines. mealstorm: chromium: A space ship shooting game that uses OpenGL,it comes with most distributions. airstrike: a 2D dogfight game in the tradition of the Intellivision and Amiga games 'Biplanes' and 'BIP'. It features a robust physics engine. (SDL) criticalmass: 3D Shoot-em-up a la galaxian rafkill: vertical shoot'em-up similar to Raptor (allegro) ketm: You are a spacepilot controlling your secret prototype ship (like raptor). xbat: closely resembles the classic arcade game Xevious. (space shoot 'em up ) geki2: Xenon-like vertical shoot'em-up geki3: horizontal shoot'em-up game similar to classic arcade games such as R-Type or Zero "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" Wing. xsoldier: shoot 'em up game with the "not shooting" bonus You control a space ship in a vertically scrolling window starvoyager: 2D space arcade game, themed around 'Star Trek' defendguin: a Defender clone, A certain monopoly-owning bad guy has been cloned hundreds of times by an unknown alien race. kobodeluxe: Kobo Deluxe is a third person scrolling 2D space battle shooter. sopwith: port of the 1980's side-scrolling WWI dogfighting game. Poor graphics, stupid AI, and horrible sound await you. The gameplay is simple, addictive, and fun. A `side-scroller', you pilot your biplane across a static field, destorying enemy encampments and planes. zblast-x11: (simple line-only graphics) The goal of zblast is to shoot and destroy all enemy ships before your ship is destroyed. The command is named "xzb"

Power Manga Chromium Defendguin

• Vector based, Asteroids and star dust clones:
  • bumprace: A 'star-dust' moving like game.
  • vectoroids: like Asteroids and star dust.
  • xinv3d: a 3D vector-based space-invaders game
  • xasteroids: X-based asteroids-style arcade game
  • xgalaga: space invador
  • xoids: Asteroids game with powerups and color graphics
• other space-related action games:
  • space-orbit: A 3D space combat simulator, realistic Newtonian physics.
  • moon-lander: An SDL game based on the classic moon lander. The objective is to land your rocketship safely using a limited amount of fuel while fighting gravity.
  • searchandrescue: a 3D where you fly a helicopter to Search (for) and Rescue people in distress, graphics minimized to suit slower computers
  • Vegastrike: an OpenSource 3D Space Simulator.
  • xpilot: a multi-player tactical manoeuvring game for X. Each player controls their own fighter equipped with a variety of weapons,
  • xblast: Multi player blast-the-others game inspired by Bomberman (Dynablaster).
  • spacearyarya: a third person shoot'em-up similar to classic arcade games.

2D car racing: trophy: 3D car racing: racer: A very realistic 3D car racing simulator and virtual reality simulation, see www.racer.nl you may download a binary for nVidia cards, if you have another card you need to compile it from source, or search in package repositories. xracer: A free Wipeout clone for Unix and X race: (libclan) 3D arcade overhead car game slune: 3D first person cartoon-like racing and car-crashing game tuxkart: A 3D go-kart racing game with several famous OpenSource mascots neverball: (neverball & neverputt) 3D arcade games: Neverball: guide a rolling ball through dangerous territory and mazes, like Marble Madness and Super Monkey Ball Neverputt: hot-seat multi-player miniature golf game for 1 to 4 players. features of all the elements that in Neverball, including moving platforms and barriers, teleporters, ramps, and drop-offs. battleball: soccer game played with tanks or helicopters!! tuxracer: This is a 3D race on snow, you have to collect fishes, it comes with most distributions. csmash: CannonSmash, a 3D table tennis simulation game Billard (snooker) games: flying: pool/snooker/carrom/hockey/curling simulator for X11 (Especially the billiards) billard-gl: 3D billiards game gtkpool: simple pool billiard game written with GTK+ Flight Simulators: flightgear: Flight Gear Flight Simulator (fgfs) is a free and highly sophisticated 100% realistic flight simulator. SABRE: flight-simulator focusing on the older jets and piston-engined fighters of the Korean War / Cold War era. Featured are F-86 SabreJet, MiG-15, F-84 ThunderJet, F-51 Mustang, and Yak-9. All of the planes in the game can be flown by the player as well as the computer pilots, see 'http://sabre.cobite.com' TerraGear: another flight simulator. gl-117: a 3D action flight simulator featuring 20 missions, different fighters, a random terrain generator, lighting effects, sound effects, music, and joystick support. Homepage: http://home.t-online.de/home/Primetime./gl-117/gl-117.html

Racer.nl Slune Tux Kart Tux Racer Flight Gear

DOOM was one of the first 3D games(first released in 1993 by id Software), it's a legendary first person shoot'em'up 3D games which means that you see the world as seen from the eyes of your player, later DOOM2, hexen,quake, heretic (1 and 2), Unreal Tournament, Soldier Of Fortune. Medal of Honer and many others follow later, the original DOOM is available for Linux from 'www.idsoftware.com' you could get a demo from 'ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/doom/linux/', idsoftware and lokigames produce many native (nonfree) Linux games, such games is composed of an engine and maps called 'WAD' files, one engine could play 'WAD' files for different games (DOOM, Hexen and Heretic), 'WAD' files are platform independent, they could be obtianed from the game CDs for another OS (provided that you buy the game), from the demo shareware verion, download free contributed WAD files (like 'boomlump.wad' from 'www.teamtnt.com') or design your own WAD files. There are many free enhanced DOOM and alike engines for Linux like:

• doomlegacy: (eg. doomlegacy-sdl) it can be played between 32 players over TCP/IP. It features a lot of improvements over the old (commercial) DOOM game (also play Hexen and Heretic) visit: 'http://legacy.newdoom.com' or 'http://doomlegacy.sf.net'.
• prboom: 'http://prboom.sf.net' it's is based on MBF and LxDoom
• lxdoom: 'http://lxdoom.linuxgames.com' which is based on Boom, written by TeamTNT (www.teamtnt.com).
• edge: 'http://edge.sf.net'

• those found on EMACS, games menu.
• bsdgames: it includes the following programs: adventure, arithmetic, atc, backgammon, battlestar, bcd, boggle, caesar, canfield, countmail, cribbage, dab, fish, gomoku, hack, hangman, hunt, mille, monop, morse, number, pig, phantasia, pom, ppt, primes, quiz, random, rain, robots, sail, snake, tetris, trek, wargames, worm, worms, wump and wtf.
• empire: console game simulation of a full-scale text war.
• cowsay: (or cowthink) A configurable talking cow, which turn text into happy ASCII cows, with speech (or thought) ballons. If you don't like cows, ASCII art is available to replace it with some other creatures (Tux, the BSD daemon, dragons, and a plethora of animals, from a turkey to an elephant in a snake).
• console based RPGs.
• Interactive Fiction (int-fiction): A story in which the reader takes on the role of protagonist and actively influences the plot and progress of the story. The most common kind of interactive fiction is the adventure game, the first example of which was Adventure, by Crowther and Woods.

• bzflag: a 3D first person tank battle game
• atanks: atomic tank-battling game (allegro)
• qblood: 'www.planetblood.com/qblood/'
• cappuccino: a game that if someone (your boss) come in, he will think that you're working hard "he is busy doing something really important"
• netmaze: 3D Multiplayer Combat Game
• koth: King of the Hill KOTH, is an artillery game in the grand old tradition of little tanks with ridiculously powerful weapons trying to blow each other up while trying to avoid getting blown up themselves.
• madbomber: A Kaboom! clone, "Mad Bomber" is a clone of Activision's classic Atari 2600 console
• penguin-command:a clone of the classic "Missile Command" Game, but it has better graphics and music. You have to defend cities by shooting at missiles, flyers and smart bombs.
• xscorch: Clone of Scorched Earth, Xscorch is a clone of the classic DOS game, "Scorched Earth". The basic goal is to annihilate enemy tanks using overpowered guns :)
• mirrormagic: Shoot around obstacles to collect energy using your beam. A game like "Deflektor" (C 64) or "Mindbender" (Amiga).
• thrust: a port of the classic Commodore 64 game

2.7.4. Playstation games and other emulators.

Yes! you may run Playstation CDs on your Linux, all you need is a small program called 'pcsx' from 'www.pcsx.net' or 'ePSXe' from 'www.ePSXe.com' and for Playstation 2 from 'www.pcsx2.net'. Those programs allow you to save the game on the hard disk, and save your high secore or level as if you have a 'memory card', you may download some free or demo play station games from those sites. PCSX 1 and 2 has a built in fast BIOS (but with less compatibility), you may get a real play station BIOS for more compatibility or for the other program, from 'www.ngemu.com' also you may get Plugins there, in this sitte select 'playstation', then click 'plugins' then click 'Linux plugins' on the side bar. The last site contain screenshots, articles, and compitability list . (make sure you have a hardware accelerated openGL video driver before you talk about performance)

Other game-related emulators are

• zsnes: Emulator of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System _(TM)
• nestra: Nintendo Entertainment System emulator (dynamic recompiler)
• fceu-sdl: SDL version of FCE Ultra - a nintendo (8-bit) emulator.
• gnuboy-sdl: a portable GameBoy emulator.
• visualboyadvance: a full featured Game Boy Advanced emulator.
• gngb: GameBoy Emulator.

You could run games designed for Windows or DOS using x86 emulators like the famous non-free program called 'vmware', fortunately now we have free emulators like 'bochs' and the super fast emulator 'qemu' which works much faster, those programs could be used to run systems (called guest system) on/using other systems (called host system), for example you could run GNU/Hurd or Windows on your GNU/Linux (or even run a different Linux distribution on your Linux) without rebooting your Linux (they could be used on the other direction, to run Linux on Windows too). Those programs emulate the hardware, not the software, you should have a copy (and a legal license) of the OS then you have to install it on the virtual system, this means that if you want to run Windows programs this way, you should have a Windows! Some hardwre emulators are designed to run one single system, for example 'dosemu' which gives you an emulated environment where you could install DOS, one may have IBM-DOS or MS-DOS, but you could run DOS games without any of them by intalling 'freedos'.

Those hardware emulator are too slow, maybe they do not fit for running most recent bloated-graphics games (even though 'qemu' offers some optimizations when you emulate x86 hardware on x86 hardware), you could use software emulators, a rewrite of emulated system, they are faster and needs no copy (thus no license) of the emulated system, an example of those emulators are 'dosbox' ('http://dosbox.sourceforge.net') which allows you to run old DOS programs and even games (since it support emulation for Sound Blaster,VGA and other drivers), another example is 'wine' which enables you to run Windows application except games (for it lakes Direct-X emulation), if you need running Windows games you could use 'winex' instead, See 2.9 Running 'Windows' programs., you may find a list of games that 'winex' could run at 'www.transgaming.com'

2.7.5. Notes.

Real games need an OpenGL with hardware acceleration, in other words your video driver should support 'glx' or 'dri', to know if it's so, type:

bash# glxinfo | grep direct

Those are some Linux games related sites:

• www.happypenguin.org
• http://www.icculus.org/lgfaq/gamelist.php
• www.linuxgames.com
• www.lokigames.com
• www.idsoftware.com
• LinuxGamePublishing.com

• http://icm.linux.tucows.com
• www.linuxapps.com
• www.icewalkers.com